With rapid growth of mobile data transfer over a high-speed communication network such as 3G or 4G cellular services, managing and controlling such data transfer become increasingly difficult and complicated. Transferring massive amount of data between various portable devices such as smart phones and laptops over a typical or standard network becomes increasingly challenging. A conventional network layout includes Internet, LAN (local area network), and wireless networks that includes hundreds of network devices such as access switches, routers, and bridges for facilitating data delivery from source devices to destination devices.
With increasing popularity of portable devices, online advertisements over various applications as well as mobile applications become prevalent and widely practiced. To support and control voluminous online advertisements over various applications, managing online advertisements becomes an important network task. For example, an advertiser typically compensates a publisher based on a scheme of cost per click (“CPC”). For instance, the advertiser compensates or pays 10 cent to a publisher every time a user clicks on a posted advertisement. The CPC scheme, however, also induces or invites fraudulent activities, also known as click fraud. Click Fraud is a problem in online advertising wherein advertisements are clicked by non-customers seeking to gain publisher revenues.
A conventional approach to minimize click fraud is to examine Internet Protocol (“IP”) source address to determine whether the clicks are generated from the same IP address. The advertiser can decline to pay if multiple clicks are detected from a single IP source address. Some statistical techniques and IP address-to-Location-mapping techniques exist to mitigate the problem of click fraud. However, a drawback associated with the conventional approach is that it does not handle spoofing very well. Spoofing or spoofing attack is a cheating or fraud act that disguises itself as another IP addresses and/or falsifying information for hiding its true identity.